The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 9/25/08 Section: News

Ted Gup will head the journalism department starting next year.

Newspaperman Ted Gup will be the journalism department's next chair, he said in an interview with The Beacon on Thursday. Gup will take over Emerson's second largest department next fall; until then Janet Kolodzy will remain the department's interim chair.

The veteran reporter brings a strong print journalism pedigree to Emerson. Gup was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1981 for his series on government contracts, written while he was an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, where he worked with Bob Woodward. He held the same position at Time Magazine, and has written for many of the nation's most widely read publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate.com, GQ, the Columbia Journalism Review and Newsweek. He's authored two books, including Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, which won the 2008 Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Gup is the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, according to the university's Web site. He earned his law degree at Case Western Reserve after completing his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University.

He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow, according to the Web site for the Leigh Bureau, for which Gup is listed as a guest speaker.

Gup is, however, a stranger to the broadcast booth, compared to some other candidates vetted by the college, said broadcast journalism major James O'Leary, who said he was on the student committee which met with candidates and provided feedback to the department early last semester.

"I was very surprised," said O'Leary, co-president of Emerson's chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. "I was a little disappointed."

The senior said what Gup has accomplished is impressive, but his selection is a divergence from the mantra of media convergence preached during Kolodzy's administration; the notion that the college's curriculum should reflect the industry's trend toward combining media. Though each candidate specialized in print or broadcast media, he said, Gup's was the most heavily tilted toward one side.

"He said he'd been on a TV show here and there, but he'd never hosted or produced a show," O'Leary said.

Continued...

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